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Recorded in June of 1995, Five Dollar Chant was my first attempt at emulating the sounds of Free Jazz and improvisation in a solo setting. Of course, the use of multiple overdubs by a solo artist renders the concept of "group improvisation" rather ludicrous in this setting, but nevertheless, the influence of such artists as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Charlie Haden, and McCoy Tyner is present, and as misguided as some of the overdubbed "group improvisations" might have been, I like to think my heart was in the right place. This was recorded at my parents' home in Baton Rouge, LA, in the weeks prior to my moving permanently to Houston, TX, to the Hawthorne House. The majority of this particular recording involves improvisation on various combinations of piano, electric bass, and alto saxophone.

At the time I did many of these earlier efforts, the HIC was still without an actual Free Jazz styled group, which was something I was very interested in doing, so in lieu of a group to play with, I would create my own "groups" through the use of multitracking, and make what I now recognize to be impressive facsimiles of Free Jazz improvisation. Improvised Horsey involved a much more diverse set of instrumentation, as one of the major benefits of the Hawthorne House was the plethora of various musical instruments lying around, much of it on semi-permanent loan from our friends. To this day, several of our friends have still not gotten their instruments back.
The Drone Wrench was the initial manifestation of my interest in drones. At the time, I thought it was a pretty exciting work, but of course later I realized it was a relatively immature conception, involving a central drone in the title piece that was absolutely static, and a series of instrumental solos over top of it, many of which I'm actually kind of proud of. The other pieces (on what was the flip side of the original cassette) are, in my present estimation, actually a bit more interesting, especially "UEM2NXE2" (named for an old UNIX password I had when doing graduate work at the University of Houston), which is a work for electric bass and three alto saxes, and "Bliss and the Sitar", a personalized version of a bassline I had played during a jam session with Bliss Blood, the recording of which was tragically wrecked by an errant mic cable. Tacked onto the end of this CD is the title track from the now permanently out-of-print Sagittarius Mo, technically the third album in the series, which I recorded with the assistance of my good friend and long time musical compatriot, David Gambrell, using drones, backwards vocals, and a detuned banjo.
Taking a step back from the brink of "drone madness", I recorded Divine Homework primarily on piano in a series of largely romantic or impressionistic style shorter pieces. A so-called "soundtrack to a movie never made", much of this satisfied (for a time) my lifelong desire to create soundtrack music for movies. Of interesting note is "The Bellydancer's Reunion", a track styled much like "UEM2NXE2" in its instrumentation, and "In the Cellar", a Biota-esque ramble through dank corridors, empty chambers, and the distant sound of aimless dissonant singing. Pointlessly tacked onto the end of this particular CD is the 37 minute edit of the formerly 44 minute Wide Area Network album, a single piece composed of four ebowed guitars.
Returning to the standard drone-and-jazz weirdness of The Drone Wrench, the combination CD of The Bastard Index/Salthanikon still stands as one of my personal favorites from this early period. "Salthanikon", the title piece, is a 20 minute excursion into the sort of drone-based darkness I was originally trying to create on The Drone Wrench, only this time it was far more successful. By breaking away from a sequential set of solos and opening it up to a more chaotic "everything-at-once" style, it instantly became more interesting and more atmospheric. The simple combination of Stratus synthesizer, alto saxophone, electric bass (playing the distinctive loping bassline, over and over and over again), and electric guitar twanging dissonantly over it all, meshed to create one of the very few of my compositions to ever have been performed by other groups (including The Democratic Art and The Defenestration Unit), and the only one so far to warrant a sequel of sorts, in "Salthanikon B", included on the Lazy Squid Comp 2001. The portion of the CD from the original Bastard Index album does hint strongly at drones, but they are less explicit and less synthesized, with a greater emphasis on horns, including the trombone of longtime musical "partner-in-crime" Mike Switzer.
Okay, admittedly I was trying to be difficult on this album. The final album in the "first phase" of the Charlie Naked solo project, and the last album of mine to be recorded in the Hawthorne House, Seven Monkeys, a double album of primarily piano and Stratus duets, could get a little hard to get through at times. Most of the problem was that in trying to create what I considered at the time to be apt "music for nightmares", the fact that it often seemed like it could go on forever was very relevant. The largely long and meandering duets between squeaking, bleeping, and droning analog synthesizer and atonal and dissonant piano (a la Cecil Taylor, minus the technique, precision, or harmonic/rhythmic creativity), steeped in deep reverb, are at times creepy and at times boring. Nevertheless, an integral part of the album is its own refusal to apologize for what it is, so in that sense, it succeeds admirably. Two of the tracks filling out this double CD set are taken from the preceding cassette release, Equations Too Good to Be True. One of them, representing "the Past", is a standard three-piece Free Jazz styled piece, while the other, meant to represent "the Future" was the first of many so-called "Random Abstracts", in which separate tracks were recorded with no real relation to any other tracks, and then mixed together, emphasizing the random relationships created by accident.
Some time had passed between the recording of Seven Monkeys and the follow-up cassette, Voicebox 3 AM, followed almost a year later by The Bassist is Never Alone. Between these two albums stood Wide Area Network in the original cassette release order, but now they have been combined onto a single CD for your listening pleasure! The juxtaposition of "Voicebox 3 AM" with "The Bassist is Never Alone" is a study in opposites: the earlier recording is resolutely static while the later recording moves through its parts in a linear, suite-like arrangement. "Voicebox 3 AM" (which was originally released with a second, nearly identical track to fill out the full album length) is comprised of three tracks of radio static, wherein the radio was tuned into frequencies between stations, and overdubbed with a fourth track of fretless electric bass. The sum effect is one of monolithic block of white noise with a great many intricacies and distant voices buried beneath its nearly transparent surface. "The Bassist is Never Alone" is a very different track, utilizing pillows as percussion, electric and acoustic guitars, and several tracks of ghostly, droning, wordless vocals, as the suite moves from psychedelic crunching guitar rock to droning atmospherics with the distant sound of the television in the background.
I recorded The Magnificent Octopus entirely in a 12 hour period, during a nasty bout with the flu. At the time I was mightily impressed with my own efforts, but again, I believe this might have been at least somewhat influenced by my illness, as this album really hasn't held up as well as I had originally hoped it would. Some of this is due to timing: as I was ill, I didn't really have the energy to flesh out some of the more skeletal song constructions creatively, so some of the pieces tend to drag a bit. However, on the plus side, this album contains some of the strangest song forms I've ever worked with in the Charlie Naked project. There is a cover of "Xerox Machine Ballet", a song originally done by Avijit, the first HIC group (actually it was even PRE-Collective). There is a song with a loping, almost funky bass rhythm, and of course the expected atmospherics, this time provided by extensive use of cheap plastic keyboards, most made by Casio. And "The Magnificent Octopus" itself, created by 8 tracks of ebowed guitar drones, moving from harmony to harmony, but again, unfortunately for far too long to hold one's attention. As much as I do enjoy some of the pieces on this album, it was my own waning enthusiasm for it shortly after it was completed that caused me to search for a new method. Consequently, this was the final album not primarily constructed on a computer.
The first of the more "modern" Charlie Naked albums, Oceans of Shattered Glass was a difficult album to put together, largely because I had never created an album using the computer before, so my method was as yet untested. By the time this album was finished, it would become the standard method I used to create all of the works to come after it. Basically, I would record individual bits of sonic samples, (for instance a piano solo, or even a phrase played on the piano, or a drum hit, or a quick phrase on the trumpet, or a few seconds of an oscillating fan), on my 4-track cassette recorder, and then dump them all onto my computer into a sample library, which I would then pick through, digitally altering, processing, and editing the samples I decided I was most likely to use. Then I would use a looping/composition program to "assemble" the album out of all these disparate pieces of sound. On this first album, the first two and the fourth tracks were actually still based on preorganized song structures (a holdover from my method on The Magnificent Octopus), but the third and longest track was completely freeform and open, with no predetermined organization or plan. And since, to my ears, that was the most enjoyable part of the suite, that was the direction I inevitably moved in over the next few years.
By the time Gorjus was recorded, a very significant event had already occurred in my musical trajectory: Mike Switzer and I, each intending to record our own electronic/ambient computer album, had instead combined our talents and created The Last Bastion, an impressive hour-long collage of musical snippets, found sounds, and instrumental solos which was shortly thereafter spun off into our electronic experimentation duet, The Last Bastions. About this time, I made the startling if somewhat simplistic realization about the type of music we were both starting to explore, that you could take a musical snippet or sample already used in one piece of music, drastically alter it digitally, and it could become a part of another album, or even the primary basis for it. Given to naming things unnecessarily, I decided to call any album I constructed in this way one of the Penumbra Series. The first of these was Gorjus, constructed entirely from an originally eight minute organ solo I'd played that we'd used in The Last Bastion, stretched and forced down in pitch until it became an ominous ultra-low hour-long roar, combined with some digitally sped up and "smeared" jinglebells. The result, while not necessarily one of the most overtly interesting albums I've ever made, still stands as one of the purest "ambient" pieces I've done. I love to go to sleep listening to it.
Space Monkey became the first large-scale example of the Penumbra series concept; as opposed to Gorjus, instead of simply taking one part of another work, altering it, and using it as the basis for an album, I used a single library of sounds recorded all in one go, and used them to create three full albums (as well as Ten Sequential Epilogues, which was something else entirely). I had originally decided I wanted to make an album using totally new sound samples, so I went back to the HIC HQ over on Lawson Street where Mike lived, and I recorded a new batch of samples to use on the collection of instruments we had there. I had decided I wanted this new album to be something special, something that I put a lot of work into (possibly feeling guilty about Gorjus having only taken a single evening to assemble), so I ended up spending four months painstakingly constructing it. I am very proud of it, but then again, the following albums I felt were just as good, and took much less time, so maybe I overworked myself on this one. At any rate, this album is a perfect example of the sort of dense but atmospheric ambient albums I enjoy putting together and listening to. It, and its two successors, in my opinion, are among the high points of my albums thus far.
After the relatively monumental task of constructing the Space Monkey album was finally complete, I felt a bit anticlimactic. I was bored and restless, and felt that all that work and preparation should have produced more than just one album, so, inspired by the lesson I'd learned with Gorjus, I decided to construct another album using some of the components I had recorded already. Using a track composed of various bass parts I had recorded as a textural basis, I took a single loop of jinglebells, and altered the pitches again and again, creating over a dozen (and possibly over TWO dozen) slightly different loops of jinglebells, then combined them all in a huge wash of soft high pitched jingling sounds, creating a curtain of atonal sound, with various tracks of jinglebells moving in and out of the mix. The result was a very simple and relatively static hour-long density of sound I called Ululation. Compared with the relatively elaborately structured Space Monkey, I found its straightforwardness and simplicity very satisfying. Two near total opposites had been created using the same cache of sounds, exemplifying the whole concept of the Penumbra series yet again.
Barely two months later, and I was bored again. In an attempt to discover what else I could do with the sounds I had created, I came upon yet another variation I could explore: where Space Monkey is a study in density, Behemoth, using many of the same samples, some of which retained enough of their original sound to be identifiable in both albums, is a study in sparseness. Instead of layering sound upon sound upon sound to create unique relationships between the samples, I laid most of the samples used in Behemoth out end to end in a suite-like arrangement, moving from one single sound smoothly to another, creating in essence the "flip side of the coin" of Space Monkey. The focus moved from the elaborately constructed whole created by combination of sounds to the sounds themselves, taking the same basic elements of one album and giving them a whole new meaning in a different context.
Before finally dumping the sound library I had built up and was ultimately realizing was pretty much spent, I decided to try one last experiment. Utilizing all the sound samples not already used in both the Oceans of Shattered Glass album and the Space Monkey trilogy (but which were collected for those two purposes), I dumped them all into a folder on my computer, and ran a program I found which randomly selected sound files from this folder and altered them randomly as well, sometimes altering the pitch, sometimes reversing the sample, and sometimes just playing the sample straight, with no alteration whatsoever, and created the double CD album Ten Sequential Epilogues, as a sort of send-off to all the previous projects which had occupied my time thusfar. While the effects of this particular program (which shall go unnamed) made this possibly the most chaotic and random of my albums, it was an oddly satisfying and interesting experiment, which I felt was a wholly appropriate way of closing the book on those projects, and moving on.
In late 2001, a very valuable member of the HIC as a whole, and The Defenestration Unit specifically, a fellow by the name of Ben Lind, moved to Taiwan. Before he left, he entrusted to me the task of converting an ancient cassette tape of songs he had sung at the age of barely two years old into the CD format, with the extra privilege of allowing me to use these performances as source material for whatever I wished to do with them. Finally, in March of 2002, I constructed one of my least ambient, but most spooky albums, Lind. Utilizing only a couple of extra samples from some Defenestration Unit albums of the previous year to flesh out the sound (mostly piano sounds), I created the entire fifty minute piece from these almost thirty year old recordings, resulting in a melange of distorted childlike voices, replete with all the strangely distancing imperfections of old tape, in an oddly affecting tribute that can most accurately be described as "haunting".
The second in the Penumbra series, The Wake-Up Call was originally the title of a track recorded by the Defenestration Unit in April of 2000. Details concerning this particular recording, outside of the recording date, are pretty sketchy, so it's unknown who exactly is playing on it, or whether the curious condition it was found in was due to digital glitching during the mastering process, or some sort of intentional creative editing when it was first recorded. Either way, the track was found to be unusable for the TDU album it had been rather arbitrarily originally slated to be on, so rather than lose the track altogether, I decided to put it to good use. What you hear when listening to the final product is the result of a remarkably simple treatment, even by my standards. I simply took the original track, slowed it down considerably, and then mixed in a mirror image of the track, but reversed, so it played backwards, way in the background. Again, as I had to reassure myself when I felt rather silly about how minimalist my methodology could be sometimes, the point is not to be as complicated as possible, but rather simply to create something listenable and interesting. All praise be to the 2000 edition of the Defenestration Unit, who made this album possible in the first place.
Three months later, and I was out of ideas yet again. Occasionally (as you may have noted), I reach that point. The point where I feel like whatever I was doing previously has been explored as much as I care to explore it, and I have to figure out something new to try. After much thought, I decided this time to try exploring two different concepts: breaking down the whole into a suite-like arrangement of shorter pieces, and experimenting more with allowing some of the instruments I used to actually sound like they were supposed to, and be identifiable, instead of digitally processing them to sound vague and abstract. For this first attempt, I decided to try three parts of twenty minutes apiece (in keeping with my then-prevalent theory that albums should be right at one hour long), gradually building from abstraction to defined tonality and rhythm. Again, the building blocks in this early experiment were somewhat crude: I used a straight synthesizer drone for the first third, built it up with an organ drone for the second, and used a looped overdriven electric guitar pattern for the third, all three ornamented with a unique central improvised solo and other sounds. For no discernible reason other than the faint and airy quality this piece had (up until the third part, which was much more solid and violent) I called it Ghostly Arcades.
As is sometimes the case, I suddenly decided to backtrack for a moment. In the process of exploring the possibilities inherent in allowing the instruments used to be more recognizable, I realized there were several instruments at my disposal that I hadn't even thought of using yet, which could provide me with more interesting textures, especially since I had previously relied mostly on guitar, drums, and keyboards. I had an Indonesian rebab, a Tibetan bowl, wooden flutes, a small accordion, and the Kelly CelloStick, which I'd been using in the Last Bastions quite a bit, but rarely on my own. I think I was reading one of the old Grant Morrison "Doom Patrol" comics, and there was a line in there about someone's hallucination or vision, and though I may be remembering it wrong, I thought it said something about "massive structures moving". At any rate, whatever the specific wording, the general language gave me a striking bit of imagery. Something huge and vague, off in the distance, hidden by darkness or space... something unknown. Massive Structures was the result of this bit of inspiration. I created two volumes, again for the sake of balance, a very important theme in a lot of my work. The first disk was very complex in its construction, much like the first Space Monkey had been, while the second disk was much more basic and spare. Both were intended to evoke that imagery; something dark, massive and lumbering, that you can't quite make out.
Finally I felt it was time to try something melding the two approaches, abstract and grounded. For the first - and thus far ONLY - time, I decided to actively concern myself with courting radio airplay. I figured that if I tried, I could probably get something played on KTRU, Rice radio, if I only tried to make shorter tracks. With this self-imposed limitation in mind, and using primarily the rebab, windchimes, my little accordion, e-bowed guitar, a Venezuelan Cuatro, and my handy wooden flute, I recorded Upil. Of course at least one of the tracks still bucked a twenty minute running time, and of course that was probably one of the least listenable tracks on the album, but at least one of the pieces on the album was scarcely over seven minutes in length, so I succeeded on that count. To this day, this album is still something of a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, I find the textures I created to be fascinating and a great deal more intriguing and multi-hued than many of the textures of previous albums. I also found parts of the album to be a little boring. I hate to say that, because again, parts of the album fascinated me, and it listening to it reminds me very much of the sensation you get when you take too much cold medicine. But I don't listen to it all that often either, so that probably says something.
This inkling of dissatisfaction worked on me for a while. I tried to figure out what it was that bugged me about parts of Upil. Finally, I started to realize that it had a great deal to do with the fact that very few of my computer works had thus far dealt much with sparseness, despite this being a characteristic I love in other forms of art, like literature and painting. Also, even though I'd set out with at least a few of my previous albums to showcase a more grounded instrumental sound, I realized I really hadn't. You could hear guitar and organ and such on some of them, but the overall sound was still based in an amorphous abstract cloud of sound underpinning everything. So for my next project, The Black Hand of Man, I decided to bear down and really work with obvious, relatively unprocessed instruments in a structured setting, with a lot of space. For the first time since I'd taken up the computer as a composing tool, I would allow moments where literally NOTHING was making a sound. I decided to structure the piece in four parts, using primarily the CelloStick to give it a more string-oriented sound. I used short melodic patterns, multi-tracked and looped, to create thematic sections, and then used the CelloStick in a more abstract "electronic noise" fashion, or one of my saxophones, as lead voices to lay over the repeating motifs. On one section, I asked my friend Jo Bird, of ** symphony, to come in and double-track some viola, which she did, making it immediately my favorite part of the piece. I'm very proud of "Symphony A", even though I realize it's probably not a symphony in the truest sense of the term. I did make a second disk, because I was also interested in a couple of other experiments I had been thinking about. One experiment involved a riff I'd been throwing in at Last Bastions shows, which I thought went very well with Pachelbel's "Canon in D", though I thought it was kind of cheap to simply play the riff over that piece. So I reversed the "Canon in D" to give a hint of the familiar without being obvious about what it was, and also to create an interesting juxtaposition between the naturally malleable rhythm of the original piece and the more lockstep rhythm of my own playing, a result of artificial looping. Of course, I eventually had to remove the "Canon in D" from the final mix for copyright purposes. The other two pieces were drones. "For Rotten Piece" was my experiment with digital distortion, and "Shiver Angels" was a fairly straightforward result of me wanting to use the various tones I could get out of the CelloStick in a drone. Overall, I'm very proud of these two disks, together entitled The Black Hand of Man. I think they represent a new facet of my music, and probably a new direction for me to explore.